Data acquisition and storage systems have been developed in the past for acquiring data from a data source and storing the acquired data on a storage device such as a RAID or tape drive recording system. For example, in flight/test, intelligence and other data-critical applications, time division multiplexers (TDM's) have been developed and used for high-speed real-time data collection and storage wherein data from multiple data input channels is fed as a single output stream into a suitable tape or disc recorder. These known time division multiplexers have typically utilized a buffer-based, rigidly pre-programmed time-division multiplexed data bus with a single output port feeding the output stream to the tape or disc recorder. While these systems provide for flexible selection of and configuration of plug-in input interfaces, time-tagging and channel ID, acceptable channel latencies, and aggregate data rates as high as 30-60 Mbytes/s, they suffer from a drawback in that they require precise knowledge of all input data characteristics, including individual data rates and signaling formats, to precisely pre-program the multiplexer's “time-slicing” operation and select the appropriate interface modules. Once programmed, input channel characteristics were fixed and could not deviate from expected values without significant data loss.
Moreover, prior approaches, based on time division multiplexers (TDM's), feeding a single output stream into a suitable tape or disc recorder, cannot scale to the massive aggregate data rates now being contemplated in data-critical applications which require aggregate data rates of up to 1 Gbs or more. While existing Storage Area Networks (SAN's) offer high-speed file-based storage that can scale flexibly over both aggregate data rates and capacities, known SAN's do not address the special data and timing control requirements present in data acquisition and storage systems for both storage and accurate playback of data.
Therefore, there is a need for a data acquisition and storage network which is capable of supporting high speed aggregate data rates of the most demanding of data-critical applications. There is also a need for a data acquisition and storage network which is easily configurable for a wide variety of data acquisition requirements.